Tag: scholarly praxis

I’ve received a few emails asking about my approach to pedagogy. These are mostly in response to my “Dear Liberal Professor” essay published at Vitae, in which I call for empathy in the classroom and take down the silly suggestion that students are the center of all that ails higher ed. I haven’t written about pedagogy in awhile because I’ve been out of the classroom for two years now, so I’m posting my teaching philosophy statement from 2012. I still stand by most of what I say here.

Teaching Philosophy

“The human capacity to injure other people has always been greater than its ability to imagine other people”—Elaine Scarry

“We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there.”—Avery Gordon

Teaching is as much art as it is embodied practice, engagement, and content knowledge. This craft is flexible and variant, and it shifts from class to class, student to student, evolving not only from worn lecture notes and expected PowerPoint slides but also to our shared performance as students and teacher. Pedagogy feels like some sort of happening that appears as experimental and meaningful as it is multi-variant and chaotic. No classroom experience is ever the same as I describe, redescribe, and recreate my content, my expertise, to mesh with the interest, the varying levels of student expertise, and the classroom atmosphere.

Yet, my courses, no matter what the content, share a common emphasis on empathy and critical thinking. To imagine what life is like for other people is the first step for engaging their lives, and I would argue it is first step toward critical thinking and close analysis. If we cannot imagine what their lives might be like, we cannot begin to comprehend the historical and cultural forces that place them and us where we happen to be.

If we cannot imagine, we cannot analyze.

Empathy becomes a crucial component of work in the humanities. The ability to imagine one’s self in the space of another is not a vapid, disinterested act, but rather a conscious attempt to comprehend what the world of another is like. The ability to imagine, to conjure and receive what it is like for those who are not you, is valuable skill in a world increasingly strange, fragmented and intimately connected. We start with empathy, not sympathy, to imagine what the world might be like in other places, times, and cultures. To imagine is to connect. This is not an individual enterprise. It takes collective effort to create new visions, new performances, and new approaches to knowledge. I am not a singular auteur (seriously, 2012 Kelly, seriously?), but rather the curator of our collective knowledge and experiences. Imagination, then, becomes the gateway to analysis, critique, reflection, and comparison

My pedagogy hinges on creating a community for each of my classes where we know, respect, and engage one another. This engagement with students as individuals and as communities makes them my colleagues as we do cultural interpretation together. Collegiality, respect, empathy, and a good dose of humor allow us to connect and work together to create a space to foster and encourage knowledge as well as keenly needed interpretive skills. Treating students with dignity and compassion means that we can discuss the thornier issues of religion in American life together with less conflict and strife as a community of interpreters working together. I understand that students can only participate in empathy and respectfulness, if it is modeled for them. To trust one another in the classroom means that we learn together from each other. My goal is to not only to share my expertise, but also to teach them how to analyze religious people, objects, history, and events with careful attention to encourage them to become cultural analysts as well.

To accomplish this classroom environment of collegiality and analysis, my courses are all multi-modal including smaller lectures, required discussion, class debates, media analysis, group work, and group research projects. Working in groups and focusing upon discussion creates a more approachable classroom climate as they get know one another and me more directly.

Additionally, my scholarly research further molds the style and substance of my courses. In my own work, I make use of ethnographic methods to enrich historical study and to scrutinize and recreate the worldview of historical actors. Ethnography is a valuable tool for students as well as me because it complicates historical methods with the emphasis on in-depth engagement of a culture and the world of another. I employ ethnography to introduce my students to religious worlds of various individuals and religious movements to showcase the diversity, logic and contradictions of these movements. Moreover, my interest in media and content analysis appears most clearly in my upper level classes, in which students complete a media analysis project. The media project cajoles students into analyzing what is at stake not only in how media is constructed from newspapers to advertisements to music to fiction to film but also what is at stake in our consumption of media. My syllabi reflect not only the necessary knowledge of the subject matter but also the scholarly trends in interpretation of this material, so content and method become equally important. There is also malleability to my course planning and strategies, so I constantly evaluate which material works best for my students.

Outside of the classroom, I make myself available to students as well to foster relationships and provide guidance and encouragement. At the University of Tennessee, I advise both the Religious Studies Association and the Muslim Student Association. I have moderated and participated in panels about religious intolerance and Islamophobia. Last spring, I moderated a series of campus discussions of religion and race, a student-driven initiative to find better ways to discuss and engage one another about diversity. Relationship building has become of my key strategies in and out of the classroom to make students know that their scholarly work and their concerns are important to me. I want them to become better students and better people, and this engaged relationship hopefully allows this to happen.

I’ve been thinking about academic writing and the absence of the I, the signifier of the first person. Some disciplines find the I useful as a method to that places you, the author in the text. The scholarship marked explicitly by your person, as if it could be any other way. Religious studies, however, is not entirely sure what to do with the I.

For some, relying on the first person becomes a marker of confessional identity, religious commitment, or activism. For others, like ethnographers of religion, the I is a necessary part of their practice. The scholar must be present because of the interactive relationship between you and subject. You must use the I to place yourself in conversation, events, and analysis. Sometimes, you need to note where you are and what you think. Often, this will require a shift to the first person.

My own training in American religious history seemed nervous about the I. For a long while, I was also nervous about what the use of I in my own scholarship and writing might mean.

My own journal articles (except for my article on evidence), my book (except for the introduction and afterword), book reviews, conference papers were all shorn of the author’s presence. I deleted (almost) every instance of the I.

In graduate school, advisors explained that “I think” “I feel” “I believe” weakened your arguments. This made you seem wishy-washy, ambivalent, or unconvincing. Make claims forcefully, they told me. Don’t qualify your analysis with I. Yet, I wanted to seem ambivalent because I was. I wanted to signal that this was my opinion, not a definitive statement about the subjects that I researched. I wanted less certainty, not more.

What I came to realize was that inserting your self into academic work made one’s work somehow lesser. Absent authors made bold arguments. Who needs visible qualification when you can stay hidden behind your evidence and arguments?

Graduate training eroded my presence in my scholarship. Not all of my courses sought to remove the I, but most massaged the personal pronoun away. The I slipped away in edits, revisions, and finished papers.

Our scholarship was not about us (but it always is). Objectivity was dead (except we played at it anyway). Subjectivity was an apparent flaw in the system; it couldn’t be avoided (but we tried to valiantly to eliminate it). Scholarship was about something bigger than us, perhaps nobler. It was a product of intellect, work, sources, and analysis, not bounded by the limits of our bodies and experiences (except it always was).

The I drifted away.

Even though I resented these unembodied approaches to scholarship, I acquiesced anyway. Sometimes, I still fought. I tried hard to include “I think/I feel/I argue” in early drafts of my dissertation. This was my perspective; I was fallible. Why couldn’t my prose reflect my own ambivalence, my tentative assertions, and my attempts to figure out things that might not have easy answers?

Yet, I removed the first person in draft after draft; the partialness of my scholarship smoothed away with a quick tap of the delete key. My claims and analysis appeared more assured than I ever really felt. The I was the bearer of my uncertainty, so I excised it. False sense of certainty took up residence in my work. My arguments appeared more and more convincing while I felt less convinced.

I faked certainty. I wished for doubt.

When I decided to take time away from academia, my writing transformed. The I exploded upon the page. I couldn’t contain my use of the first person. I, marked by the use of the I, appeared in every piece that I wrote speaking to doubt, heartbreak, pain, and ambivalence. Finally, I found a place in the text. I shuttered myself for too long, so now I reclaim my voice, my person, in each essay. What would my scholarship look like now? I’m not entirely sure.

What I now wonder (and fear) is that the removal of the first person in academic writing is an attempted removal of our selves from our scholarship. Editing out the I becomes a way to separate our selves from what we research, write, and analyze. Yet, what might we lose in this removal? How does the shift from first person to third person affect the way we write about our subjects and how we construct our scholarship? What happens if bold arguments can only occur with a shift away from the first person? Why don’t we want to mark our uncertainty and our ambivalence? Perhaps, we should start.

First comes an email. A senior colleague in your field needs your opinion on contingent labor. You message back with your opinion. You also send links to posts, articles, and thinky pieces. Senior colleague responds, “Can we talk about contingency more?” You agree, but admit that you are no expert. Senior colleague is contacting you because you wrote a piece about your experiences as an adjunct and a full-time lecturer. You’ve also written about the challenges of the faculty job market and your attempt to walk away from academia. You realize that this makes you a voice on this issue. You are not sure how that makes you feel. You are writing to learn to live with how your life turned out, but you aren’t sure you are an activist. People keep calling you an activist. You wonder if speaking up is the mark of activism. It makes you sad to think that’s the case.

Next come the phone calls. You have a lovely chat with the senior colleague, who heads a prestigious committee for a learned society.He wants that society to take action on contingent faculty (finally). You agree wholeheartedly. This has been one of your frustrations with the learned society that you’ve been a part of for 12 years. Almost every year, you send money to this group for dues and conference fees. A quick calculation reveals that you’ve paid thousands of dollars on plane tickets and hotels to attend its annual conferences — all in an attempt to build an academic career.

Here’s my second paper for #sblaar14, which was an invited talk about activism at the junior level. This was another strong panel with a small audience. Unsurprisingly, I took the prompt “Can we BE activists at the junior level?” as an excuse to think about activism’s relationship to not only religious studies but also the modern university. It is a small miracle that there’s so little cursing.

Can we be activists at the junior level? Hell.

Kelly J. Baker

Over the summer, I mentioned to a dear colleague and mentor of mine that I would be participating on a panel about activism at the junior level. He laughed at me. “How can you be on a panel about activism at the junior level,” he asked, “when you never made it to the junior level?” His question was also my question when I received the invitation to join this panel. My name, it seems, pops up when you ask people about activists in religious studies. This is puzzling and also sad.

I’m at best adjacent to academia. I took a year off, which is now a year and a half, and I have no plans to return. After six years on the job market, I bowed out. Publicly. I’m now a freelance writer, who covers higher ed, gender, and religion. I never made it to the junior level (if we’re defining junior as assistant professor. I’m not sure we should).

Yet, I’m at the AAR presenting on a panel about activism, even though I wouldn’t label myself an activist. This is a label applied to me because I write starkly about higher ed and sometimes my own discipline. Maybe my bar for activism is too high, and writing should count. Maybe everyone else’s bar is too low. Yet, I agreed to participate for two reasons. First, I still care deeply about this field we call religious studies, despite my attempts not to. Second, I have things to say about about the role of academic activism in the age of contingency. I’ve lived with this question since I received the invitation. I’m not sure I have any good answers, only more questions.

First, I want to tweak the initial question. Instead of “can you be an activist at the junior level?”, I ask, “Can you be an activist if you are perpetually on the job market?” My tentative answer is a firm “no.” Under the current job market, in which contractual is king and tenure track is not, anything you write, say, or do can be held against you. Members of search committees admit that they look for reasons to ELIMINATE candidates rather than keep them. The question of activism is even more fraught for contingent workers, who work at the whim of department chairs and heads. With positions that can be terminated at any time, certain kinds of activism might prove too risky while others might guarantee you are back for another semester. Continue reading Activism

This paper was my contribution to a roundtable on contingency in religious studies at the annual AAR meeting. I talked through the paper rather than read it as written, so you miss my bad jokes , wild gestures, and animated facial expressions. What is striking to note is that the small audience was all contingent workers, who were mostly women. There were two men on our panel of five. Contractual labor needs gender analysis. Let’s hope this starts a much-needed discussion.

Gendering Contingency in Religious Studies at #sblaar14

I’ve only had contingent positions. I started adjuncting as a graduate student for extra money and continued adjuncting at multiple institutions in multiple states until I received a full-time non-tenure track job in 2011. I’ve taught at community colleges and big state universities, and for a long time, I taught heavy course loads while keeping up my research and searching for a tenure track job. I quit my lecturer job because I no could handle the strain of contractual work. Now I’m a freelance writer. I’ll say it again: I have only had contingent positions.

This shouldn’t necessarily be surprising since contingency is now the norm, rather than the exception despite the what the AAR/SBL jobs report tries to suggest. The AAUP notes that 76% of the instructional positions at American universities and colleges are non-tenure track. Since 1975 tenured and tenure track positions are up by 26% while part-time appointments are up 300%. My story and the stories of my fellow panelists illuminate the reliance (or dare I say over reliance?) on contractual labor in higher ed and within religious studies. Yet, I don’t want to talk today about contingency generally. Instead, I want to direct our attentions to the relationship between the casualization of labor and gender.

It first occurred to me that contingent labor might be gendered at non-tenure track faculty reception at my old university. My fellow lecturer (also a woman) and I entered a room filled with many, many women and few men. Our university was trying hard to be equitable to those off the tenure-track, and the reception was a meet and greet with one of the vice presidents, who was establishing a system for promotion for lecturers. I was struck by the abundance of women in lecturer positions from all over the university, not just the humanities.

Usually, when critics lament the adjuntification of higher education, neither gender nor race are prominently discussed. While contingent labor is a clearly problem for the modern university that learned societies like AAR must react to, it is not a problem that affects everyone equally. What does it mean for religious studies and the AAR if contingency is a problem that overwhelming affects women? How does, or should, this change our approaches to contractual labor within our discipline? More importantly, what does this suggest about the gender politics of religious studies more broadly?